Sorry To Bother You: You can't just tame people (Patreon)

Since the murder of George Floyd resulted in widespread protests, tonnes more disproportionate violence from police, several US cities started talking seriously about defunding their local Police Departments, and both radical and frank discussions of racism and white supremacy entering the mainstream in an unprecedented way, a whole lot of White People™ realised they could no longer remain uneducated on these issues. 

Shortly after, Netflix reported that The Help had topped its list of most searched films. The Help is a 2011 film made by a white man called Tate based on a book by a white woman about good white people who can see that The Racism is bad, and care, and want to change things.

This news, that The Help had become Netflix’s most searched film, was immediately derided and mocked on twitter for the clear attempt by clueless white people to try to educate themselves on racism. I, meanwhile, watched Sorry To Bother You, because I’m one of the good white people, who cares.

This is a film that absolutely deserves a close, and in-depth inspection across its many insightful facets and messages. It is absolutely jam-packed with scathing satire, sharp comedy, and a bunch of moments that are uncomfortable and work so well because they’re distressingly believable, like when the CEO of WorryFree pressures Cassius into rapping for all the white party guests, and Cassius correctly guesses what they want to hear is a song comprising only two words - “shit” and the n-word - and then all the guests start singing along. Or when Cassius is filmed in a humiliating moment getting hit in the head with a coke can, and the video goes viral online, as embarrassing moments in black people’s lives often do, and then to get access to a platform later, he has to be publicly humiliated even more.

However, in light of the recent protests and current political mood, I’d like to zoom in on what happens in the ending. At this point I’m supposed to give a really huge spoiler warning in case you haven’t seen the film and don’t know about the horse people, but I’d rather just get on with it. Half way through the film, Cassius, the protagonist, discovers that WorryFree (the company selling barely disguised slave labour) is turning its workers into horse-human hybrids, or equisapiens.

The thinking by WorryFree, and their CEO Steve Lift is that if they can manufacture a rebellion among the equisapiens, plant Cassius among them as a civil rights activist - as controlled opposition - then they can control the equisapiens and keep them from ever gaining any real power. The boldness of this movie to just announce the co-opting of radical movements by the ruling class is amazing - I’d call it unprecedented, but the same thing happens in Snowpiercer where John Hurt plays a reformist radical leader who turns out to be working directly with the front of the train. Wait, spoilers for Snowpiercer if you haven’t seen it and don’t know that John Hurt turns out to be a class traitor.

However, when the protagonists free the equisapiens, they revolt against the company, against the police - because, of course they do. They don’t want to be enslaved animal-people. The thinking of the company is clearly that if they make their workers more bestial they’ll be able to control them more easily, but you can’t just tame people.

This moment of revolt among the equisapiens is really interesting because it relies on a shared understanding rather than a character-focused narrative. In this way it even bucks the trend of normal storytelling. Usually it is vital to see that your heroes liberate the horse people, and lead the horse revolution, and inspire the victory with their powerful deeds and ideas, but in Sorry To Bother You the horse people start fighting back off screen while Cash is in a police van and they free him.

Look at it like this - The Help is pretty fucking terrible for a bunch of reasons: it centers the experiences of a white woman who is a very obvious authorial insert rather than the experiences of black people; the story throws new characters in at jarring and bamboozling moments; it was produced by 1492 Pictures, which isn’t a great look for a film about racism; the main plot is about exposing racism, as if the real problem was just that people didn’t know about the racism; a black domestic worker called Ablene (like the black maid Aibilene in the story) tried to sue the writer of the original book for using her likeness without her consent; and if you’re going to compare it against Sorry To Bother You, it makes the absolutely devastating mistake of not featuring Lakeith Stanfield anywhere in the movie.

One thing it consistently does, though, is frame petty revenge for injustice in a certain way. For example, Celia Foote tells Minnie that if she were being beaten by her husband she would just hit him back. For example, if you only know one thing about the film it’s probably that Minnie feeds her racist ex-employer her shit baked into a pie. 

It’s not that nobody would ever do this, but this was written by white people, and for a story that is trying to represent the terror of white supremacy and the violent oppression of black people in the american south in the 60s, this feels like it was written by white people. You know what I would do if I experienced racism form one person, The Racist? I’d bake The Racist a pie and put a dookie in it and then I’d watch when they ate the dookie pie. If I were black I would simply debate the racism.

Between this, Minnie being given the helpful tip to not be with her abusive husband that she clearly never thought of before, and the main plotline of the journalistic exposé on all the racism, it creates this world where people who experience oppression just need to have the idea to not be oppressed any more, or in the white main character’s case, the idea to care about black people. In the world of The Help, people can be mistreated, fired, abused, killed, and they just won’t do anything about it, until they get the idea that they should change something.

In one way, this is only subtly different to how liberation works in Sorry To Bother You, and in another, much more real way, these two films are worlds apart. See in The Help, ideas come from individual special people (usually white) and everyone else is just living in a false consciousness until they are given the idea. In Sorry To Bother You, however, people are slowly pushed into poverty, into systemic abuse, and so on, and because they know nobody else is speaking up, nobody else is fighting back, and they know they can’t change things on their own, but when the oppressors try to pull off something seriously awful, say, turning them all into horse people, they know they’re mad, they know everyone else is as mad as they are, and they know that now is their moment.

Each time a black person is killed by American police, the chant gets louder. Every time people can see police getting away with murder, more people call out to abolish the police, to fight back against white supremacy, and each time more people hear that call. And then, as peaceful protests are met by absolutely stupendous and absurd displays of militaristic police violence, they know they’re mad, they know everyone else is as mad as they are, and they know now is their moment.

Because you can’t just tame people.